1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to an information offering system on the Internet, and in particular an information offering system including a lottery to induce offerors to register their home pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
One way of offering information on the Internet is by way of a company or private home page. Advertisers are beginning to notice the possibility of using a home page as an advertisement medium because a home page can attract many persons who are interested in the kinds of information offered.
It is becoming increasingly common to supply advertisement information about a product or service on the Internet by providing on the home page of an information offering service the company name of the product or service along with an image and profile. An interested consumer can go directly to the home page of the product or service by clicking on the image.
As an example, FIG. 1 shows the home page of Mr. A concerning jazz including an advertisement of the home page Z providing information about jazz. The left part of FIG. 1 represents a display realized on a computer by a browser which interprets the HTML format source at the right side of FIG. 1.
An advertisement section in FIG. 1 corresponds to the part inserted between the tags &lt;h1 align="right"&gt; and &lt;/h1&gt;. This source has the following meaning. The image file designated by "img src=" indicates the location of the image file of advertisement Z displayed by the browser. The uniform resource locator (URL) designated by "a href=+ indicates the routing destination of the advertiser's home page to where the browser transfers when the image file of advertisement Z is clicked. Therefore, in this example, when the image file of the advertisement Z is clicked, the home page corresponding to the address "http:.backslash..backslash.www.company-z.co. jp.backslash.jazz.backslash.index.htm" is retrieved.
One disadvantage of the above scheme is that the existing advertisement information can be copied easily by anyone who desires because such information is only image data. Moreover, it is also easy to change the routing destination when a user "clicks" on the relevant image data. Namely, a person can easily pretend to be the other person by copying the image file designated by "img src=", then rewriting the URL of the routing destination designated by "a href=", for example, into the URL of the impersonating person's own home page and then placing such URL on the Internet.
Therefore, it is also possible for a person to achieve an illegal purpose by pretending to be another person. A company could increase access to its own home page by posing as another company. In this way, an illegal profit could be obtained by, for example, posing as a competitor on an online shopping service. Similarly, a person could pose as another person or company and set the routing destination of the entrance information to an obscene home page, with the intention of causing the other person or company to lose its reputation.
For the reasons discussed above there is a need, regarding advertisements, to develop a technology to control such copying. Namely, even if literal copying is done for an illegal purpose, as explained above, a user cannot achieve such illegal purpose if it can be determined at a glance whether or not the image data and routing destination are genuine. Thereby, the reputation of the company which has presented the advertisement will not be damaged through illegal actions involving information available on the Internet.
On the other hand, when conducting an advertising business on the Internet, it is desirable to give incentives to present advertisements on home pages and to link to an advertised page after a home page has been accessed which presents an advertisement for the advertised page. The present invention provides a method of giving incentives by distributing lottery tickets and sending a prize to those who receive lucky numbers in the lottery. At this time, there has been no site where a speed lottery has been realized on the Internet.
In the above example of an advertisement, the present invention routes a user to a lottery ticket issuing page when the routing information has been processed. The address of the ticket issuing page is written directly into the HTML source of the advertising home page. The lucky number is then picked from the issued ticket issuing numbers.
However, Internet browsers are capable of storing the URL of the ticket issuing page as a bookmark. Therefore, there is a disadvantage in that a person could repeatedly obtain a lucky number without viewing an advertisement each time.